'We were villains': how Wyoming's Black 14 blazed the trail for Missouri protests

Forty-six years ago, a group of 14 black football players at the University of Wyoming banded together in the name of enacting social change – and were promptly kicked off the team. This week in Missouri, their pride lives on

Scuffles break out at a CSU football game over the dismissal of 14 black athletes at the University of Wyoming. Two of the protestors wear black armbands with the number 14 in solidarity with the athletes.
Photograph: Barry Staver/Denver Post/Getty Images

Tony McGee was in a car dealership Monday morning when he’d heard about the end of the revolution, that the frustration of young African-Americans and a football team’s strike had combined to run the president of the University of Missouri out on a rail. But then a funny thing happened: Old wounds reopened. Old skeletons, long since buried, rattled in the back of his head.

“And when I saw it, it brought back memories of the Black 14,” said McGee, a former NFL defensive lineman turned businessman and broadcaster. “We were treated in the same way they were. We were called other names. We were told this and that. We were cheap-shotted and nobody even recognized it. And now, 46 years later, they’ve got enough power on this team …”

Before Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike, before Tim Wolfe, before Concerned Student 1950, there was the Black 14, a group of 14 black football players at the University of Wyoming who in October 1969 banded together to try and enact social change – and were thrown off the team as a result.

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Wyoming’s Butler was a man named Willie Black, a doctoral student who was chancellor of the university’s Black Students Alliance. The undefeated Cowboys, then ranked 12th nationally, were to host Brigham Young University, run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on Saturday 19 October, and Black wanted to arrange a protest of the church’s policy against allowing African-Americans to pursue the priesthood.

Black met with football players in the middle of the week and declared his intent to protest to the university’s athletic director and president. Debates over Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement at the time made campuses a virtual tinderbox, and the generational divide was especially felt in big-time athletics, where many coaches and administrators were appalled at the radical cultural and societal changes rumbling around them.

On Wednesday of game week, the college town of Laramie had seen a series of anti-war demonstrations and teach-ins, putting Wyoming football coach Lloyd Eaton on edge. Eaton, who had replaced Bob Devaney as head coach in 1962 and steered the Cowboys to back-to-back 10-win seasons in 1966 and ‘67, had a team rule forbidding football players from participating in political demonstrations.

“Coach Eaton, that’s the way he was,” McGee recalled. “He wanted to do his thing. He believed in his way or no way.”

Friday morning, McGee and 13 of his African-American team-mates met at the dorms, donned black armbands and went to Eaton’s office at Memorial Fieldhouse to try and convince him to allow them to join with the BSA movement. It would turn out to have the opposite effect: A furious Eaton instead led them to another part of the building and immediately kicked them off the team.

Accounts vary as to the specifics of conversation, but all sides confirmed that it was one-sided and visceral; Eaton himself would later testify in court that he had told the 14 players “that if the program at Wyoming was not satisfactory then perhaps they had better think about going to Morgan State or Grambling”, traditional black colleges.

Later that day, the 14 players asked the university president, William Carlson, to arrange a meeting with campus leaders, administrators and Eaton. A meeting was held; Eaton did not attend. Coaches and players then met with the Board of Trustees and the governor, Stanley K Hathaway, a gathering that went into early Saturday morning. The punishment stood, and the 14 sat in the stands later that day as their teammates knocked off BYU, 40-7. Chants praising Eaton could be heard throughout Wyoming’s Memorial Stadium.

“It seemed like everybody was against us,” McGee said. “It was like we were villains.”

Eaton’s decision would ultimately prove his undoing in Laramie and begin the gradual unraveling of one of the decade’s better programs to that point. A group of four African-Americans on the Wyoming track team left the school in protest. The Wednesday following the game, the coach and president held a joint news conference to announce that Eaton’s no-protest rule had been amended, that it only applied to protests on the field. Eaton was reportedly asked at one point if, had this amendment been place the week before, would the 14 players still be on the roster? The coach allegedly left the news conference without reply.

But the damage had been done. From 1950-69, the Cowboys played in five bowl games and never posted a losing season. From 1970-86, they made one postseason appearance – the 1977 Fiesta Bowl – and produced only four winning campaigns. After a 1-9 record in 1970, Eaton left coaching to take an administrative position, eventually moving on to the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. He passed away in 2007 at the age of 88.

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McGee also wants to clarify a point, noting that the Black 14 were not explicitly anti-Mormon, nor against any religious movement. Tensions had been building among the African-American players about their treatment at BYU’s Utah campus the year before.

“The only thing we were protesting was the way we were treated on the field,” McGee said. “We weren’t against (Mormon) beliefs. More than anything, we were just going against our treatment.”

A week after the dismissal, a lawsuit was filed in federal court seeking an injunction that would seek damages and reinstate the players. In late November, a local newspaper reported that the man presiding over that case, US district judge Ewing T Kerr, had been a guest at a Wyoming booster event held to honor Eaton, his coaches and the seniors. The next spring, Kerr tossed out the case. A circuit court reversed the decision shortly after that, but when the case was brought to trial, Kerr again ruled for the state.

Only one of the Black 14 was a senior. Some stayed. Others scattered. McGee transferred to the historically black Bishop College and was drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1971. The Michigan native played 14 seasons in the NFL, primarily in New England, and was credited with 21 sacks over his last three years with Washington, where he was a reserve with the Super Bowl XVII champions.

BYU integrated its roster in 1970; eight years later, the LDS opened priesthood to African Americans.

“It’s a reversal, though,” McGee said of the Missouri unrest. “People got involved with us because of the way we were treated. These football players got into it because of the way their peers and others were treated.”

In 1969, Lloyd Eaton was a law unto himself. In 2015, Tigers coach Gary Pinkel went to social media to support his players and insist his program was united, black and white players alike.

“And maybe (Pinkel) doing that made a big difference,” McGee said. “That’s strong. And that’s kind of what we wanted from our coach and we didn’t get it.”

The cynical view is that to do otherwise, in this climate, would’ve been suicide on the recruiting trail, one of the main rails that drives major collegiate athletics, where boosters and television also jostle for elbow space on the pedestal. The deeply cynical view is that money ultimately ruled the day: Pinkel takes in a reported $4m, Wolfe a reported $459,000. Forfeiture of Saturday’s game – against coincidentally enough, BYU – in Kansas City, for which the Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium had already been rented, would have cost the university at least $1m without a penny in return. Even McGee acknowledges the latter was probably as much a factor as any altruistic motives.

“I’m not an advocate of anything and I can’t say, ‘Oh, they did right, they did the right thing, they did a good job,’” McGee said. “I’d have to research how many incidents (there were); were they ignored? Were there any dangerous situations? Why would it have been so prevalent? It must have been something that had been festering over the years.”

For administrators – and, indeed, the NCAA – Wolfe’s ouster at Missouri was another blow in what continues to be an elongated, losing battle to maintain the hierarchy of false amateurism at the largest collegiate institutions. But it was also a show of unity and strength to enact reform, a throwback, football players trying to instigate a seismic shift at the very top of the ivory tower, not because of dollars, or greed, but simply out of principle.